1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the emulation of circuits, and more specifically to debugging an emulated design under test (DUT).
2. Description of the Related Art
Emulators and prototyping boards have been developed to assist circuit designers in designing and debugging highly complex integrated circuits (e.g. CPUs, GPUs, or SOC). An emulator includes multiple reconfigurable components, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which together can imitate the operations of a design under test. By using an emulator to imitate the operations of a DUT, designers can verify that a DUT complies with various design requirements prior to fabrication.
Debugging a DUT involves iteratively emulating the DUT in order to obtain waveforms of signals from the emulated DUT. These waveforms are analyzed for errors and discrepancies. Each emulation run requires use of all of the emulator's hardware resources (e.g., thousands of hardware components). The more complex a DUT gets, the more complex the required tests are to verify it. This complexity leads to an emulation run that can take multiple hours or days. Since debugging typically involves multiple emulation runs, debugging a DUT is very time consuming and expensive in terms of resources.